Latest release

We now support Python on Windows, Linux and Mac. You can also make use of Python Wheel installation from pip. A Python Wheel is a type of package format (similar to a ZIP archive) to make installation faster. Pip is a package manager/installer for Python. This support was added as a result of many developers who wanted to use Python for their projects. PDF SDK brings you industry-leading PDF technology to your Python applications, either working on a web-based environment or desktop. Enjoy the added flexibility with Python and PDF SDK.

You can now use our edit APIs to create tables that contain rows and columns with whatever height/width you require. Tables are a tricky thing to get right in PDF and this is something the Foxit team have been working on a lot for this release. We’re pleased to announce the following controls with this feature:

• Format cell borders (line thickness, color and dash)
• Control row/column height and width
• Write text/image contents in a cell
• Set margins between content and cell borders
• Format content style (font, size, color, alignment, text annotations)
• Merge cells functionality

We’ve worked extensively on improving our engine for this release. The first focus was centered on annotations and specifically the annotation loading performance on large documents, and enhancing the line drawing in distance line annotations.

On the form side of things, we optimized the strategy for loading all form fields to improve the page rendering efficiency. In the previous version of PDF SDK, the loading of all form fields in the side panel occurred prior to page loading which caused the page render to become stuck and blank when scrolling. The underlying form rendering logic is changed from sequential one-by-one rendering to sequential batch rendering. The sequential rendering method makes the U thread and worker thread of each form be executed alternately. Batch rendering can achieve the parallel execution of UI thread and worker thread, and batch rendering will not occupy the UI thread for too long, so as to make full use of worker thread and ensure that the page will not be stuck for a long time.

Finally, work was done on ZoomTo/GotoPage. PDF SDK for Web uses a bounding rectangle to calculate visible pages on screen. This method was being calculated every time it was called which caused the browser’s DOM elements to be redrawn. This process was inefficient. As an example, take a 20 page PDF. There are roughly 2 visible pages but when we get the data it shows the whole PDF. Thus, we decided to adopt the browser native interface IntersectionObserver, which massively improves the engine performance here.

If the above was too technical, our PDF engine has become even more advanced on handling PDF objects in all scenarios, from simple to complex. We will continue to improve our engine and UI layers to maintain the best performance in the market.

Foxit provides excellent support for accessibility standards in its products, with a complete accessibility solution compliant with WCAG 2.0 in Foxit PDF Editor. Ever since we’ve started our accessibility features, we were committed to the challenge of bringing this technology to a customizable SDK product so that companies couldn’t just use it, but make their own PDF software accessible. We’ve made great advancements on our core technology and we’ve officially started to develop these features in PDF SDK. 

Auto-tagging is the first step in getting to an accessible PDF solution. By running our recognition engine through the file, our smart tags can be used to easily create artifacts such as headers, footers and page numbers, paragraphs, lists, figures (alternative text, expansion text), tables (rows and headers) and a table of contents. Our tags are compliant with accessibility standards, which means that they would be recognizable by accessibility engines and screen readers. 

Take a look below at how the UI looks for getting and setting alternative text for your images. 

This release comes with a newly updated Web SDK demo which contains a guided walkthrough of our SDK and its latest features. View our Web demo by clicking below.

Click here.

We’ve enhanced the signature demo in the PDF SDK for Web viewer here by adding more timestamp illustrations as well as created sound annotation illustrations to the Annotation demo here. We’ve also created a new print demo for .NET Core to show you how to get the most out of our new features. Download our SDK here and take a look.